Welcome to the new Healthtalkonline website, where you can see and hear people talking about their real-life and personal experiences of health and illness. To be diagnosed with an illness can be bewildering and frightening. “how’s this going to change my life?” “how will it affect my relationships, my family, my friends, my colleagues?” “Will I still be able to do the things I used to be able to do?” “How will I choose which treatment to go for?” If you want to find out about other health matters, not just illnesses, well the Healthtalkonline site is designed to answer questions just like these by providing access to the experiences of others who face exactly the same dilemmas.

The University of Oxford carry out interviews all over the UK with people who have an illness or health issue. Here on Healthtalkonline you can watch video clips, listen to the voices or read the accounts of ordinary people relating their own experiences. You can search through the site for specific terms or topics which may be concerning you.

Healthtalkonline, which gives free access to all users, whether patients, their family, their friends or healthcare professionals, to a unique and highly approachable source of information. It’s focussed on your needs and is extremely easy to use. All of the information is rigorously monitored to be reliable, and it's updated regularly.

Come and look around the Healthtalkonline site and feel you are not alone, many others are perhaps going through similar experiences of health and illness and here is a safe, reliable place to find out about their experiences and the things you really want to know. As Phillip Pullman said about our site “True stories feed the mind with information and the heart with hope and strength”. I hope Healthtalkonline will help you and give you support by sharing the real-life stories of many other people.

Jon Snow: I think it’s one of the most exciting developments in the internet age, it really is the absolute cornerstone of what society should be all about.

Titles: Since its launch, Healthtalkonline has attracted support from leading academics, health experts and celebrities.

Jon Snow: I think it is an absolutely unbelievable service, provision, opportunity for ordinary people who experience all sorts of health difficulties.

Hugh Grant: My mother died of pancreatic cancer nine years ago and one of the things that happened when she was diagnosed and being treated was that, although the doctors were marvellous in explaining the disease and treatments, we did wish as a family that we knew a little bit more, especially first hand from other people who’d suffered the disease or been close to the disease. And so when this website, Healthtalkonline, came to my attention a year or two ago, I thought it was a great thing to support.

Jonathan Miller: it adds to, ultimately, to the literature of something absolutely essential to all of us as human beings.

Jenni Murray: It has extremely reliable founders, so you know that whatever you’re hearing is kosher. But that idea of people sharing their experience, I think is really important.

Karol Sikora: The great thing about this site is that it’s validated, you know you can trust it. It’s been gone through very carefully, it’s factually correct, and there are no extremists in there that are telling information that’s really is not true.

Students, young doctors have seen very few patients with any specific illness. Naturally, they gradually accumulate that experience. This allows them to, very quickly, a couple of hours at a time, just look at different diseases and see what it’s really like from the patient’s viewpoint. And that’s tremendously educational because, reading a dry textbook and you can learn all the classifications, all the Latin and Greek words but you don’t know what it’s really like to have the disease.

There’s no doubt an organisation like this and a website like this captures the momentum of the 21st century in terms of information and empowerment of patients.

Phillip Pullman: When we’re told we’ve got this or that disease we want to know more about it, we want to find out whether we’re going to survive, what it’s going to feel like to be treated in various ways and above all we want to hear from people themselves rather than doctors and Healthtalkonline does exactly that. The experiences of real patients, told at full length, not just a snatched little soundbite here and there, but the full story of someone’s engagement with the disease and with the treatment and with other patients who’ve had it and with the doctors and surgeons who’ve dealt with them, is such a valuable thing.

Patients & Carers

By sharing other people’s experiences, we aim to answer questions such as how a health issue will affect your daily life, making treatment choices, finding the right support and more. Click on the conditions list above or find out more about how we can help you.